Star Trek Social Club

Related to this article, VFX supervisor for "Picard," "Strange New Worlds," and season 4 of "Discovery" posted this rather interesting thread to Mastodon:

Reading the article going around about Bryan Fuller’s Discovery, and people’s “What If” scenarios reminds me of 2016 and my brush with it interviewing for the VFX department there:

I got a chance to interview as a potential Compositing Supervisor. It’s a trend which continues today that some productions have small in-house groups to concept things, sometimes do shot work, directly interface with a show to do certain things faster and cheaper than going to vendors, like previs.

I get to Los Angeles Studios downtown to talk to the Producer, and the first thing I notice in being in the offices; no real concept art to be found, no white board with scheduling info; I think I saw 3 pieces of artwork (only one of which was ever reflected in the show, but more about that later). No one really in the office yet, but it was also a late evening and they weren’t in production yet.

Kinda a red flag, but maybe the stuff was somewhere else I just couldn’t see.

I go through a pretty standard interview process, and when asked what questions I might have, I start with some pretty standard ones: How many hours a week? 60. How big a team? 20ish. What types of work are you planning on doing, concept, prep shots, actual shot production? All the VFX work of the show.

OK big red flag.

That is not enough to do this kind of show in the 2010s. Maybe a TNG show with TNG amount of effects an episode, but not modern TV.

When do you start shooting? In months. Do you have scripts to breakdown and budget staff? No. Any scripts at all? No.

WHAT? These two things do not go together, especially on a new show. Pilots for shows will float around for sometimes years being prepped and budgeted.

Do you have art for phasers, transporters, warp, or even ships? They showed me like a temp transporter. And the 3 pieces of art on the walls. Maybe they had more and didn’t want to show me. I did sign an NDA

What kinds of shot pipeline do you have? We have Lightwave and Nuke. No I mean pipeline. Nope.

At that point, I knew this was going to be a disaster and wanted no part of it. I finished up pleasantly with them, and got the hell out of Dodge. There is bootstrap small high performance team work, which I’ve been a part of, and there’s throwing yourself into a meat grinder. It didn’t matter if they wanted me, I didn’t want them. Which was crushing for a lifelong Star Trek fan.

Months away from shooting and no scripts on a completely new show that was supposed to launch a streaming network is a recipe for disaster.

Later, I found out that after spending millions of dollars in prepro, Fuller had “departed” and all those people were sacked. Fuller, while being responsible for some really loved shows, also has a history of lots of aborted projects, or projects he left really early on. But I’m sure other people actually know that story better than I.

At that point Alex Kurtzman was brought in to actually make a show that could be produced. I went back to the VFX place I was working for, and would just be a viewer like everyone else. I wouldn’t get a chance to work on Trek until 2019 working on Star Trek: Picard for DNEG.

Anyway millions were wasted for nothing that was able to be shot. Just something to consider with “What Ifs” of Star Trek. I really hope someone writes a book about Star Trek production someday.